The Future of Bitcoin

Alternative Paths

Once upon a time, a cryptographic protocol gave birth to a beautiful and ingenious network called Bitcoin. Its mysterious creator proposed a new type of money that could compete with our imperfect banking system. The idea of a decentralized and fair financial system has captured the minds of many and inspired a lot of people to join the cryptocurrency movement.

But that was just the beginning. Things have changed since then. Speculations, smart contracts, scalability (and other serious issues), not to mention multiple blockchains offering all sorts of development paths for the technology behind the first crypto reversed the situation.

Bitcoin’s future is yet uncertain, although it still remains the number one cryptocurrency by market cap. The competition is way too fierce and the main issues are still there. Despite numerous Bitcoin improvement proposals and the emergence of the Lightning Network, the main blockchain is still quite slow and bulky.

What is the future of Bitcoin?

There is a big chance that in the future users won’t even know they are using Bitcoin. For instance, most of us do not go into details of how the mailing servers work and just send emails automatically. And just like that, Bitcoin can help to enable instant online anonymous payments via exchanging it to local currencies.

Bitcoin technology can be used in order to eliminate banks from the financial system, cut costs and make it fairer. Of course, this needs time, but we’ve got plenty of that. Once the technology is developed enough, average users won’t have any problems with managing it in their everyday lives.

Bill Barhydt, Co-Founder and CEO of Boom Financial, sees another possible role for Bitcoin as collateral:

“I think the single best use case for bitcoin over the next five years is the collateralization of real world assets to facilitate banking.”

Pegging Bitcoin’s price to other assets is a simple and yet promising solution.

Using Bitcoin as a store of value is another popular idea. Glenn Hutchins, chairman of North Island agrees with it:

“It might be that the role of bitcoin in the system could be to bring value back, to hold your value there while you have tokens that have other use cases that you aren’t using at the moment.”

Right now Bitcoin is far from it though. High volatility is not exactly helpful when it comes to storing value. Even when that long-awaited mass adoption happens and the overall market cap increases, volatility would still be a problem unless someone comes up with some sustainable price-stability mechanisms. For bitcoin, the future of currencydepends heavily on the state of its developmental process.

We once told you about the possibility of building smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. It may sound foreign today, but truth be told the BTC network offers a higher level of security and a safer environment. Building Bitcoin smart contracts could pave a whole new way for the cryptocurrency’s future implementations.

“Bitcoin will never change, they will always try to do proof-of-work, and good luck with that! It is a tough proposition. If you ask me, it is not environmentally friendly, and it leaks value out of the store of value. But they have a bunch of advantages that will prop them up for a couple more years, I am sure. And they will never completely disappear.”

Here we must say that banks are not really good for the environment either, in fact, they may even be worse. But leaving this sensitive topic aside, let’s examine if Bitcoin could really vanish into thin air.

The future of cryptocurrencies: bitcoin and beyond

It is really difficult to imagine that blockchains and their communities could just disappear. Despite the fact that Bitcoin is very far from perfection, it has gained thousands of devoted fans that aren’t ready to give up on it.

Currently, Ethereum or EOS are way more adapted for building dapps and making the best out of smart contracts. In turn, developers are not rushing to find ways to do it on top of Bitcoin’s blockchain. Payment infrastructure by Ripple allows performing instant, cheap and secure transactions and this is acknowledged by the major players in the modern-day financial scene. And still, the Bitcoin community stands it ground. Is it simply because BTC was the first? Is it more like a religion at this point?

While searching for answers, we’ve come across a medium post of Eric Olszewski, where he shares the idea that it is conservative investors who usually support Bitcoin:

“It’s likely that conservative investors will prefer Bitcoin for its longevity, simplicity, and adversity to change while more risky investors will take chances on things like Ethereum for their big vision and existing milestones.”

The Bottom Line

Of course, in the future Bitcoin might lose its value. It might also be replaced or transformed.

We choose to stay optimistic though. For Bitcoin future 2019 and a few more years would hardly be game-changing. It takes a lot more time.

Regardless of what is going to happen to the first cryptocurrency, it has already made a huge impact and changed the minds of many. Bitcoin’s emergence is inspirational and it definitely contributed to the development of blockchain technology.

Categories

Download Lumi App

Related Posts

Our Top 5 In the crypto space, there is one question almost everyone has googled at some point. It’s the question that makes crypto beginners sit up all night, scrolling down multiple web pages searching Read more…

Making plans and sticking to them is one of the main underlying principles of success. Recently, we announced that Lumi Wallet is making a major commitment and going open source this summer. And while the Read more…